Rock in a hard place

Of the full half dozen expat conversations, the most tedious is probably the one that goes, "There's no cultural life here - blah, blah - everything's so new ..."

Yet, in truth, the young Arabs who are building the UAE's cultural life face real obstacles.

Especially if, like the band Juliana Down, they play melodic rock rather than hardcore. "The scene that does exist is hardcore metal," says keyboardist Sol.

"We are flying in the face of that, and some musicians are unhappy that we are as successful as we are. They see it as a betrayal."

Luckily, for now the band can afford to ignore the haters. Tomorrow their local stature is confirmed by a headline slot at the X Games concerts in the Creek Park.

Their album is due out at the beginning of next year. They are also building a local following with - by UAE standards - a hectic gigging schedule.

"At the moment we are doing a gig every couple of weeks," says Sol.

"We are the first UAE band to get any airplay. Our singer now gets stopped in shopping malls and people point at us in restaurants."

Big ambitions

The band continue to play low-key events - such as an outdoor charity gig at Sharjah - but they have also performed before a sea of faces at Desert Rock.

All this, though, is a flyspeck to their ambitions.

"I have got in trouble before for saying this, but my aim is to play Knebworth [a leading British rock festival]," says Sol, who is at 27 the oldest band-member.

"Today bands can break from anywhere. Radiohead actually broke from Israel."

Juliana Down are certainly working on it flat-out. During Sol's summer holiday (the other members are students but he does something with computers) the band camped in his basement for five weeks so that they could dedicate every waking hour to writing, recording and practising material for their next album.

Music and psychology

It will feature a sound that melds rock with the more soulful feel of Britpop and Indie. This, in part, is down to Sol spending much of his youth in Leeds (although he is actually a UAE national).

"I love bands like the Beatles and the Stone Roses - in 27 years I have only found one Arabic song I liked," he says. "We view Nancy Ajram in the same way as we view Britney Spears. We fancy them both, but we do not respect either as musicians."

Yet into the mix there is also something distinctly regional.

"There has to be something different about us because we're Arabs and we're making music here," says Sol. "Those things have to come through."

Interestingly, Sol believes the Gulf's preponderance of metalheads can be explained in both musical and psychological terms.

The power chords used in hard rock fit with both minor and major scales - just like Arabic music.

But Nu-metal's cult of victimhood seems also to provide an appropriately thunderous vehicle for a raging sense of alienation.

Juliana Down, on the other hand, have been compared to that of bleating introspectives like Coldplay and Keane.

That, I would say, is unfair. Their music has an additional edge that Sol defines as "positive anger".

"We are expressing a non-defined culture," he says. "Everything's flashy and new. You don't go to Dubai and find yourself, you go and make yourself - that's what we're doing."

So why the anger? "I think the anger is that everything's moving so fast, everything's changing," he says.

"You don't have control over it. The landmarks I knew when I was growing up have been knocked down. It can transform into anger."

"It changes day by day. You think you are on a sound footing. Then, all of a sudden, the rules change. One morning we wake up and we are a democracy. Tomorrow they could outlaw guitars - I don't think they would, but they might," he says.

Then there is also what Sol calls a "disconnect".

"There is a sense that you are removed. It is like you are an observer," he says.

"It is a lot harder making music here than it was when I was doing it in the UK. There is so much infrastructure that's missing."

Yet even if the UAE makes a hard place to rock, it also offers its rewards.

"If you've got one life to live you might as well live it where things are changing so you can influence change in a positive way," says Sol.

"I feel that we are breaking ground, challenging stereotypes and redefining things. That's a lot of fun."